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ADDKESS 



JOHN SPEER, 

President of the Kansas State Historical Society, 



ACCUEACY IN HISTORY, 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY, 



TOPEKA, JANUARY 18, 1898. 



J. S. PARKS, State Peintee. 
TOPEKA, 



OFFICERS — 1898. 



John Speer, President, - Garden City, 

Eugene F. Ware, Vice-President , - - Topeka. 

W. A. Peffer, Vice-President, - - - - Topeka. 

John Guthrie, Treasurer, ----- Topeka. 

Franklin G. Adams, Secretary, - - - - Topeka. 



IMPORTANCE OF ACCURACY IN HISTOR- 
ICAL STATE3IENTS. 



The settlement of Kansas was made in the tliroes 
of a political revolution ; and the character of her peo- 
ple and their acts must be gauged by a state of embryo 
war, leading up to a war which had no parallel in the 
civilized world. We were but a few years removed 
from a condition of public sentiment when, even in 
the most enlightened portions of the North, the at- 
tempt to discuss slavery at all had been met with 
tar and feathers, lynching, and many other modes of 
torture. Even in enlightened Boston the clamor of the 
mob of "men of wealth and respectability" had 
hardly passed away, when the very elite of that city 
had pursued the poor fugitive Anthony Burns and 
delivered him up to the slave power, and the rope 
had been tied to the neck of William Lloyd Garrison, 
and he had narrowly escaped the scaffold. Up to the 
passage of the Kansas-Nebraska organic act, it was 
dangerous to express sympathy with the slave any- 
where, and peril of death to do it near the border slave 
states. 

When Kansas was declared subject to settlement, 
the very best class of citizens were ready to harness 
their teams and pack their baggage for a land which 
had been heralded to the world as having scarcely an 
equal in fertility and productive resources. The temp- 



tation of homes in Kansas aroused the ambition of 
the very best elements of civilization, and there was 
no discount on the heroic courage of the men and 
women who dared venture upon the unique pioneer life 
now offered to the world. What followed the wildest 
theorist never predicted. Settlers from the North had 
no ambition to enter into war. Arguments were their 
weapons ; they expected a conflict of reason and of in- 
tellect, in which the ballot was to settle the question 
of whether the new state was to be free or slave. 
They came unarmed and unsuspicious of violence. 

On the part of the slave power, it is true, threats 
had been sent abroad that ''abolitionists" never 
should be allowed to enter Kansas. These threats, 
however, were regarded as bravado, until the rifle 
and revolver in the hands of the devotees of slavery 
made the welkin ring. The first night I slept upon 
Kansas soil (September 26, 1854) , our small party of 
emigrants from free states were awakened by de- 
mands of where we were from, and threats of expul- 
sion, tarring and feathering, hanging and drowning, 
to every "abolitionist" who dared to enter Kansas. 
The second night after reaching Lawrence we were 
called to defend the Rev. Thomas J. Ferril, a Meth- 
odist minister, who had just arrived with his bride. 
No retaliation was attempted. At the first election 
for members of the legislature, March 30, 1855, 1,000 
armed invaders from Missouri seized the polls and 
voted at Lawrence, and similar bodies at Leaven- 
worth, Delaware, Kickapoo, and many other places, 
electing a pro-slavery legislature. That was an all- 
sufficient cause for resistance ; and the man who 



would have fired a battery into one of those camps 
would have been as heroic a patriot as they who de- 
fended Lexington and Bunker Hill ; yet the free- 
state men bided their time in peace, although eight 
months of threats, outrage and usurpation had 
gone by. 

Several free- state men's houses were destroyed in 
the spring and summer of 1855, but no retaliation. 
To avoid a conflict of arms, the peace-loving free-state 
men met at Big Springs, Douglas county, September 
8, 1855, to consider means for a peaceful solution of 
the troubles. They had borne their afflictions then 
for more than a year. On November 21, 1855, Chas. 
W. Dow, a peaceable free-state man, was murdered 
in cold blood by a pro-slavery man. All that was at- 
tempted was to hold a meeting for the expression of 
sympathy for the friends of the dead, and condemna- 
tion of the murderer. 

Fifteen months of peaceful acts of the free-state men 
had passed, and no revenge or retaliation. .Just then 
a peaceful old man from Indiana, .Jacob Branson, so 
mild in his manners that, although I knew him pretty 
well, I never found out his politics, was arrested witli- 
out being shown a warrant, tortured by being placed 
upon a mule and hurried through woods and over hills 
and prairies until he was unable to dismount without 
help. For his rescue a body of twelve free-state men 
was quickly organized. Meeting a body of the same 
number having the free-state prisoner, his release was 
demanded, and secured without bloodshed. This 
brought on the Wakarusa war, so called, a siege of 
Lawrence, the erection of rifle-pits and all necessary 
means for defense — not against tlieir neighbors, but 



6 

against an invasion of 1,200 men from Missouri. 
Every effort for peace had been exhausted. Sixteen 
months had passed without a single hand having been 
raised against the persons or property of pro-slavery 
men. 

•As an eye-witness of the affairs of Kansas in all 
this period, I solemnly declare, and defy contradiction, 
and call on any man in this audience to deny, these 
facts. It seems almost cowardice to admit them. I 
am speaking of occurrences the like of which afflicted 
all the free-state settlements. 

On the approach of winter, a peace-loving people, 
their wives and their little ones illy provided for — a 
winter the severest that has ever occurred in Kansas — 
were assailed for 16 days by armed hordes of foreign 
enemies to freedom, because they refused to abandon 
their homes and their hearths or forswear their de- 
votion to liberty and the universal rights of man. 
Thus the armies stood. In this desperate strait. Dr. 
Charles Robinson, afterwards Governor Robinson, 
as commander-in-chief, and James H. Lane, in active 
command, ready for the charge. Governor Shannon 
at length suggested, or agreed to a consultation, and 
a peace was patched up, and a fearful slaughter, 
which no man can estimate, averted. During this 
threatened conflict a dozen armed pro-slavery men, 
Geo. W. Clarke one of the number, rode dowm three 
farmers returning to their homes, and Clarke mur- 
dered Thos. W. Barber, of whom more hereafter.* 

* These notes were not in the speech, but I asked " leave to print ": 

May 17, 1^5, William Phillips, of Leavenworth, was captured 

and taken to Weston, Mo., his head shaved, his clothes stripped off, 

tarred and feathered, and sold at auction by a negro. The charge 

was signing a prt)test against the 30th of March election. Wild- 



And yet, with all this record of patient, agonizing 
suffering, men of the East, men of learning in col- 
leges, are writing assaulting articles upon the early 
settlers of Kansas, as natural murderers, assassins, 
gamblers, thieves — guilty of all the crimes in the 
calendar of criminology. And even some of our own 
teachers in our schools of learning have been led 
into like errors. It is time that some words of pro- 
test should be uttered against this style of Kansas 
history. Let us quote from a work written by a 
professor in our State University, intended for the 
instruction of youth in our Kansas schools. After 
reciting the two classes, free-state and pro-slavery, 
in his book, entitled "Civil Government of Kansas," 
Prof. F. H. Hodder describes a third class thus : 

"The third class consisted of adventurers of va- 
rious sorts from both sections: broken-down poli- 
ticians ; restless, lawless men, to whom the restraints 
of civilization were irksome ; gamblers, ruffians, and 
fugitives from justice — a class of men who always 
drift to new countries. They cared not whether 
slavery was voted up or down, but were ready to 
embrace any party that promised them office and 
power, and welcomed a state of society in which 
murder, arson and robbery would go unpunished. 
It was the presence of this class, ranged as they were 

er'8 Annale, page 64. He was afterwards murdered in hie own 
house, his blood spurting upon the garments of a bride, a guest of 
the family (Mrs. Nancy A. G. Leibey, of Lawrence), as innocent of 
wrongdoing as the babes whom Herod slew. 

January 20, 1856, Reese P. Brown, for participation in the free-state 
election, was hacked to pieces with hatchets, carried to his home in a 
farm wagon, rudely delivered to his wife, where he told her he had 

x/i 'cruelly murdered without a cause, and died within two hours 

Mr. Mitchell, a Kentuckian, a free-state man, who had befriended 
±5rown, was early in the next summer bucked and gagged, and left 
on the prairie to die, but was rescued. 

June 6, 1856, a peaceable Kansas free-state man, Jacob Cantrell 
who emigrated from Missouri, was traveling on the highway, with 
this device on his wagon cover: "Kansas a Free State." He was 
captured, and hung for treason to Missouri." 



on botli sides in the political contest, that accounts 
largely for the disorder and bloodshed in the early- 
history of the state." 

This third class the learned author makes so prom- 
inent and leading that the fact of their presence "ac- 
counts largely for the disorder and bloodshed in the 
early history of the state." He so magnifies this class 
that the great struggle for principle between the free- 
state men who were in the right, and the pro-slavery 
men who were in the wrong, sinks into insignificance. 
This foisting of a fictitious and imaginary class as an 
important element in the Kansas struggle gives a 
false coloring to the whole conflict. In the estima- 
tion of the civilized world, the question of whether 
human slavery should be further extended over the 
free soil of America, or whether it should be checked 
in its progress further, was fought out nobly here on 
Kansas soil by as brave, enlightened and heroic a set 
of men and women as ever in the world's history bat- 
tled for a just cause. 

This mode of treatment is entirely untrue as to the 
free-state men, and it is injustice even to the pro- 
slavery men as a body. Slavery was a barbarity, and 
there is no instance in history where the forces fight- 
ing for the wrong were the best and most moral men ; 
but the South selected the most heroic and best men 
of the period to lead in the conflict, and raised money 
for this purpose. Many of these men, on all other 
questions, were gentlemen.* 

* For inBtance, Gen. Joe Shelby, who suspended his business at 
Lexington, Mo., and with forty of his hands came to Lawrence and 
voted ; and with whom I took dinner that day at Col. Sam. N. Wood's 
house. It was the manifestation of conditions. The "abolitionist " 
was considered a " negi-o thief," and the man who interfered with 
such "property" was considered as much worse than a horse thief 
as the slave was regarded more valuable than a horse. 



9 

I venture to assert (and this can only be opinion, 
but my opinion ought to be as good as that of a man 
from the East who was not born at that time) that 
there never was in this country, in the settlement of 
any territory, so honorable, upright, intelligent a 
body of men as settled Lawrence — the headquarters 
of the free-state forces in the tir»t two years of the 
conflict. Their first act was to establish prohibition, 
by the Lawrence Association, with Doctor Robinson 
as its president. The charge that "broken-down 
politicians" were a leading element is answered in 
the fact that in the first legislature elected by the 
free-state voters there was not a single man in either 
house who had ever before sat officially in a legislative 
body. It would be most interesting to follow their 
later careers as soldiers and statesmen, at least two of 
them leading brigades. Only one in both bodies was 
ever known as of intemperate habits. 

Another error : Of the Leavenworth constitution 
Professor Hodder says (page 22) : 

" Notv,'ithstanding the veto of Secretary Denver, 
who was soon after appointed governor, delegates 
were elected, and met at Minneola, whence they ad- 
journed to Leavenworth. Here a free-state constitu- 
tion was adopted, identical in large part with the 
Topeka constitution." 

It is utterly unaccountable how, from so able a 
source, an error like this should have crept into a 
book for schools. It implies that a mob, without the 
semblance of law, "after their own party had almost 
unanimous control in both branches of the legislature, 
had assembled and made a constitution, and at- 
tempted to force it upon the people. T know this 



10 

error has been circulated through several sources. 
The truth is, Secretary Denver never vetoed that bill. 
It was passed in all the regular forms, and taken to 
his office by the clerk three days, one hour and ten 
minutes before the expiration of the 40 days which 
constituted the term ; and the governor had gone to 
bed and left word with his clerk to receive no more 
messages. It was his duty under the law to either 
sign and return it, or to return it vetoed, within three 
days ; but he '' pocketed " it and refused to return it, 
attempting thus to defeat it, because the legislative 
term, as he erroneously asserted, had not expired — 
an act of tyranny without an example. This state- 
ment both houses of the legislature unanimously af- 
firmed, and declared the bill passed, notwithstanding 
the governor refused to sign it, but withheld it with- 
out his approval.* These facts were attested by the 
clerk of the house, Mr. Whiting, and Mr. Caleb S. 
Pratt, of the council, as well as by Perry Fuller and 
other private citizens ; and I superintended the prep- 
aration and delivery of the bill , and saw it taken to 
his room, as I now state. 

The men whom this statement represents as unlaw- 
fully assembled, usurping the powers of a convention, 
were as capable and worthy a body as would generally 
have been selected at any period of Kansas history. 
The charge against that body is an insult to the intel- 
ligence of the people who elected them. Three of 
them were afterwards generals in the army (James 

♦The language of the organic act is precisely that of the United 
States constitution, except that "three days" is in the former and 
"ten days" in the latter; and hundreds of bills have become laws 
just as this act did — notably the Wilson tariff bill. 



11 

H, Lane, Thos. Ewing, and Robert B. Mitchell). 
Among them were such able lawyers as Chief Justice 
Ewing, Senator P. B. Plumb, and Jas. S. Emery ; 
and Hon. T. D wight Thacher, also a member, has 
written a history of the convention, which will be read 
with interest in after -times as a refutation of the 
charge that it was possible for such a body of men to 
have assumed, ignorantly or wickedly, any such po- 
sition. 

In the same work, on page 22, Professor Hodder, 
after saying that "southeastern Kansas was at first 
almost entirely settled by pro-slavery men from the 
southern states " — in which he was mistaken, at least 
two-thirds of them being free-state — mildly adds : 

"A few free-state men had come here, however, and 
in the autumn of 1856 one Captain Clarke attacked 
them, destroyed their property, and drove tliem from 
their homes. The free-state men organized for de- 
fense under the leadership of James Montgomery, and, 
finding guerrilla warfare quite to their liking, continued 
to raid and rob pro-slavery men, both in Kansas and 
Missouri, for a year or more. In the spring of 1858, 
Chas. A. Hamilton, of West Point, Mo., raised a band 
of men for the purpose of making reprisals. Crossing 
the Kansas line to Trading Post, Linn county, on the 
19th day of May, 1858, he seized 11 free-state men, and, 
taking them to a ravine near the Marais des Cygnes, 
shot them down in cold blood. Five of the men were 
instantly killed, five were seriously wounded but af- 
terwards recovered, and one escaped unharmed by 
feigning death." 

" One Captain Clarke " indeed ! What mildness is 
this in stating a pretended historical fact as to the in- 
famous conduct of that most infamous man ! The 
true liistory of his conduct reads thus : 

Capt. Geo. W. Clarke, the murderer of Thos. W. Barber 
in cold blood in 1855, having fled the country, again ap- 



12 

peared on the unprotected frontier in the free-state settle- 
ments in southeastern Kansas, and renewed his assaults 
upon these helpless people. He was the same man who, 
at a Lawrence town-site meeting in the winter of 1854-55, 
attempted to murder Governor Robinson, and probably 
would have murdered him, had not one John Speer jumped 
upon him from his seat in the audience and partially 
wrested his revolver from him and turned it upon his own 
heart, and held it in such a position that any attempt to 
pull the trigger would have killed the assassin, until one 
Wilson, a Kentuckian, interfered and secured peace. This 
was at a meeting at Lawrence in regard to the town-site 
rights, in which Clarke had no interest, and where he was 
brought as a "killer." Before his attempt on Robinson 
he knocked Mr. Ali:»honso Jones off the stand while he was 
speaking. He also had a tilt with J. H. Shimmons with 
rifles not long after. On another occasion he had arranged 
to assassinate Jones one night as the latter was expected to 
be returning from an anti-slavery meeting, and would in 
all probability have succeeded had not Clarke's slave Judy 
got to Mr. Jones's window the night before, and in a shrill 
whisper said, "' Massa Jones, dey 's gwine to kill you as 
you come from dat abolition meetin' ef you don't look out! 
Min' w'at I say! I'ze off!" At this meeting, Ed. Chap- 
man, the man then holding the Jenkins claim near Law- 
rence, was backing Clarke up; he was the man who chopped 
down Robinson's house, for which, among other merits, 
he was soon after elected a member of the " bogus " pro- 
slavery territorial legislature ; and, as soon after that as he 
could spare time from his legislative duties, he murdered 
Geo. Wilson, of North Carolina, by a blow from a club, 
while Wilson's daughter of 16 sat by his side in a buggy. 
Wilson's death right then was only prevented by that child 
seizing the whip and reins and driving to,Westport, Mo. 
(85 miles), where she appealed to the Odd Fellows, who 
ministered to him till his death, and buried him with the 
honors of the Order ; and that murderer. Chapman, after- 
ward went to the penitentiary by the way of Iowa, and still 
later to that other place, 

" With all his crimes broad blown as flush as May; 
And how his audit stands, who knows save Heaven ? 
But in our circumstance and course of thought, 
'Tis heavy with him." 

That is the true history of Clarke and one of his 
confederates in crime. They were twin criminals 
and conspirators, whose history cannot be separated. 



13 

I had but slight acquaintance with Capt. James 
Montgomery, but I know he was not a disreputable 
man, seeking innocent blood, nor stealing property, and 
that lie had a following of as honorable settlers as ever 
peopled any country. I mean no disrespect to the 
teacher, but I would like to see some bright, innocent 
little girl in a country schoolhouse hang her head, 
raise her hand, and say to Professor Hodder : " Please, 
master, may I ask some questions? An old settler 
spoke at our schoolhouse, on the Marmaton, and he 
told us that Preston B. Plumb, William A, Phillips, 
James B. Abbott, Dr. S. B. Prentiss, E. B. Whitman 
and several other gentlemen rallied to assist Captain 
Montgomery to protect us when the cold weather was 
coming, and we had nothing but corn bread and rab- 
bit to eat, and the cabin needed chinking. Were they 
the broken-down politicians, gamblers, ruffians and 
fugitives from justice that you speak about on page 
11 of your little book? Did the gamblers want to 
play poker with papa for the rabbits?" 

Professor Hodder undoubtedly appreciates precisely 
the meaning of the word " reprisals," when he says in 
the extract we have quoted : "In the spring of 1858 
Chas. A. Hamilton, of West Point, Mo., raised a band 
of men for the purpose of making reprisals." Would 
not that imply that Montgomery had invaded Missouri 
and murdered any of her citizens? We observe here 
that, in our extract, he states that two murderers, 
Clarke and Hamilton, leading their bands, had in- 
vaded Kansas from Missouri, We knew several of 
the men whom Hamilton stood up in line and mur- 
dered and wounded. Asa Hairgrove, one of the lat- 



14 

ter, became state auditor of Kansas, and from him I 
learned much of the character of the victims of Ham- 
ilton. There was not a disreputable man among them. 
I knew Doctor Miner, and helped dress the wounds of 
Rev. Mr. Reed, one of his " reprisals." " Death loves 
a shining mark." So do devils — for destruction, 
Hamilton might as well have kept on to Lawrence, 
and taken as a "reprisal" and murdered that dis- 
tinguished divine whose name is on our programme 
here to-night, and who has recently celebrated his 
fortieth anniversary as a minister, Rev. Dr. Cordley. 
Perhaps the guerrillas who burned the house of Doctor 
Cordley, and took two or three shots at him in the 
Lawrence massacre, were merely attempting to make 
a ''reprisal" of him, and if he had died, some pro- 
fessor Oi literature might have written an apology for 
Quan trill, as apologies have been written. It will 
be noted that all the murders occurred in Kansas, 
and all the murderers came from Missouri. Why 
did all the wounding and all the murdering occur on 
the Kansas side of the Missouri line? Kansas stood 
on her own side of the line, and stood for peace ; 
and for more than four long years not one drop of 
blood by a Kansas hand ever stained the soil of Mis- 
souri ; not one armed foe crossed the " sacred soil " 
of slavery, until it was crossed by troops under 
the flag of the Union and the call of Lincoln for men 
to put down the rebellion. Hamilton's " reprisal " of 
blood was as fiendish as ever disgraced the annals of 
crime, and was neither a " reprisal " under the defini- 
tion of Webster nor Vattel. 

I speak in no spirit of animosity — not in anger, 



15 

but in sorrow. In that spirit I have a right to reply 
even to a professor in a chair of the Kansas State 
University. I hope I am not intruding my own per- 
sonality when I say, concerning the earliest move- 
ments towards the founding of the University of 
Kansas, that I have no memory of a more satis- 
factorily spent New Year's day than that of 1855, 
when I joined Dr. Chas. Robinson and A. D. Searle, 
the surveyor of Lawrence, to carry the chain, sur- 
veying a site for a " schoolhouse" where the "old 
university" now stands. If there was a better day 
spent in my own history, it was when I joined tliat 
eminent educator, Gen. John Fraser, in efiforts to ele- 
vate the embryo University, in an appeal to the 
people of Lawrence for a vote of $100,000 in its be- 
half. In the meeting to consider that proposition, a 
committee of prudent, economical business men re- 
ported in favor of $50,000. General Fraser had stood 
in the serried ranks of war, but at this time he looked 
as if he might be "knocked down with a feather." 
I moved to strike out $50,000 and insert $100,000, 
and backed my proposition up by the best words I 
could utter, illustrating the importance of education 
by my own want of it. Bishop Thomas H. Vail, 
who was present, followed in the most eloquent ap- 
peal I ever heard, and the motion was carried. The 
" school " was ended and the University began ; and 
to-day it stands, the pride and glory of Kansas — the 
peer of Yale, Harvard, or Michigan. 

It is true — too true — that several books of history 
on Kansas have been issued in the East equally or 
more unjust than the work quoted. But such works 



16 

should never go into the schools of Kansas, and it is 
because of my pride in Kansas that I attempt to re- 
fute their falsity. 

Within the past two years a convention was held at 
Houston, Texas, in which a learned committee con- 
sulted on devising a means to correct history, by 
showing that slavery was not tlie cause of the war, 
but some indefinable question of " state rights" was 
at the bottom of it all ; and they suggested that some 
man learned in history should be selected to correct 
the false public sentiment ; and recently General 
Reagan, the last of the Jefferson Davis cabinet, has 
been quoted as reiterating that sentiment. Since Ba- 
laam rode up the mountain on the only ass that ever 
talked good horse sense, for the purpose of cursing 
Israel, and rode down again ''altogether blessing 
them," there has been no better tribute to the spirit 
of freedom which first broke out in Kansas and perme- 
ated the whole Union. Not only Kansas, but the 
South and the whole world is ashamed to be com- 
pelled to believe that the institution ever existed. It 
looks now as if a premium had been offered to some 
man to write a book proving that, the Gettysburg 
speech was a fable, the emancipation proclamation a 
fraud, and old Abe not much of a statesman anyhow ; 
and a lot of eastern professors were in the race, neck 
and neck, to win the prize. 

If the war was not made upon Kansas solely to 
plant slavery here — and, indeed, to extend it through 
tlie union — why did not Pierce's administration say 
so ? If that were true, why did not the President, 
instead of ordering Colonel Sumner to plant a battery 



17 

near where the Topeka post-office now stands, ready- 
to fire upon and disperse the legislature under the 
Topeka constitution, send some peace officer and 
tell them to elect their free-state senators, and he 
would send a message to Congress recommending the 
state's admission? If slavery were not the issue, why- 
did President Buchanan in 1858 send a special mes- 
sage to Congress, declaring that slavery existed as 
much in Kansas as it did in Georgia ? Why did he, 
in that message, denounce Kansas as in rebellion, 
under a " turbulent and dangerous military leader "? 
All the '' turbulent and dangerous" people of Kansas 
wanted was a free state, and that was after Buchanan's 
own governor, Robert J. Walker, had written to him 
that Kansas was on the wrong side of the "isother- 
mal line " for slavery, that the people were opposed to 
it, and that the best possible way to do was to make 
it a democratic free state ; and that then his admin- 
istration " would go out in a blaze of glory." 

Much of the enmity to Kansas has been aroused by 
eastern men in their contention as to who did the 
most to save Kansas. The position they get the 
nearest together on is, that in the aggregate they in 
the East did it all — that Kansas could n't have been 
saved without them. Measurably the latter proposi- 
tion may be true. Without the sympathy, material 
aid and prayers of the good and great men all over 
the country, Kansas could not have been made free ; 
but the brunt of the battle, the strife and the loss 
of life and treasure, fell upon the heroic men and 
women of Kansas. Nor do I depreciate the vast 
sums of money expended by the Emigrant Aid Com- 



18 



pany ; nor have I ever forgotten the national conven- 
tion at Buffalo, in 1856, presided over by Governor 
Reeder, in which I myself was a Kansas delegate, 
where Gerrit Smith planked down $1,000, and 
pledged $1,000 per month until Kansas should be 
made free ; but what I do lament is, that so many 
''new kings have arisen who know not Joseph" ex- 
cept by tradition, going back on the deeds of their 
fathers, with few sources of information, sizing us 
up as savages, imagining that they are the priests 
preserving the history of the dark ages. 

Archimedes said he could lift the world with a lever 
if he had a place to stand on. He was mistaken. The 
great men of the East have tested that question. No 
fulcrum can be used by wiiich a corner-stone can be 
laid in Kansas, with the laboring end of the lever in 
New York or Boston. A Virginia slave, in describing 
the Natural Bridge, said : "I'll nevah forgit de day 
I driv master to see 'em lay de co'ner-stone of dat 
bridge! All de fust famblies was dar ! " The men 
who laid the corner-stone of Kansas in Boston do not 
know whether that stone was carved from the ever- 
lasting granite of the Sangre de Cristp, or of the 
kaolin imbedded in the same mountains, beautiful to 
look upon, but crumbling with the atmosphere and 
dissolving with the summer rains. 

Some of these men, if they were not so intensely 
Puritan, would claim that the Mayflower anchored at 
mid-sea, put out a lighter, and that the crew that sailed 
around by the Pacific put up the Holy Cross in the 
mountains one Saturday afternoon before prayers, 
and passed through to the eastward and discovered 



19 

Kansas long before Don Diego de Penalosa dreamed 
of the province of Quivera. 

I was amazed to read in a magazine article an ex- 
pression dropped by one of the most estimable patri- 
ots, philanthropists and divines, as well as among the 
most eminent litterateurs of this country, to the effect 
that he supposed there never were any slaves in Kan- 
sas. It is such utterances from such sources that 
hurt. What were we fighting about? The ruffian 
might bawl himself hoarse and do no harm. This 
good divine never was acquainted with Buck Scott, 
the good slave who contracted with his master to send 
him 70 per cent, of his earnings if he would let him 
live at Lawrence, and fulfilled his contract manfully, 
voluntarily returning to slavery. He never knew Tom 
Bourn, of Washington creek, whose master brought 
him and a dozen more slaves from Virginia " to estab- 
lish the institution in Kansas," who, when the mas- 
ter got scared and wanted to take them back to " tlie 
old Virginia home," replied "No, no, Massa Bourn; 
I com' to 'stablish de institution, an' I'ze gwine to see it 
froo " ; and in less time than two weeks ran off to the 
North with the whole gang ! He never made the ac- 
quaintance of Bob Skaggs, who, with 27 fellow slaves, 
made a big clearing in the woods opposite Lecompton, 
and was run off to Texas at the sound of the voice of 
the "Crusader of Freedom," and came back " after the 
break up," as the slaves called it, and made a home 
on the Verdigris, and brought his "po' ol' massa" 
in his poverty to live with him, the ex-Kansas slave. 
He never sat with your speaker at the 15ig Springs 
hotel warming his toes, while poor Liza, one of 11 



20 

slaves of a Kansas judge, cooked his meal, with her 
little pickaninny crawling around her feet on a dirty 
dirt floor. He was not present when a fugitive from 
Kansas slavery on the Marais des Cygnes made her 
escape to Samuel N. Wood's house in Lawrence, her 
back cut in welts. Perhaps the good man was not 
acquainted with that amiable Christian woman, now 
a director of this society, when the slave sleuths were 
in pursuit ; and surely he never heard her sobs and 
cries, ''Oh God! what would I do if this were my 
sister? " when her life depended on flight. He never 
knew the three pro-slavery men who took the slave to 
the Shawnee Mission to consult the territorial officers, 
and returned her to slavery ! And surely, surely, the 
good man never had a warrant issued for him as an 
"abolitionist" by that woman-whipper, after he was 
made a pro-slavery judge ! He did not even know the 
pro-slavery divines of Kansas, one of whom, at Te- 
cumseh, told me the beautiful story of St. Paul, the 
slave-driver, sending Onesimus, the slave, back to his 
master; the other at Osawkee, of whom it was said 
by the " abolitionists " that he was a pretty good man, 
but a little quarrelsome when he was drpnk ! 

When the Wakarusa war broke upon us, there were 
more than half as many slaves in Kansas as there were 
able bodied free-state men who stood up in the ranks 
for our defense. 

A few weeks ago I called upon the venerable Dr. 
J. N. 0. P. Wood at Wichita, a well known oi^ponent 
of the free-state movements, and compared notes on 
our personal knowledge of slaves in Kansas, and we 
counted over 400 — and quit. 



21 

But they said '' Shoo!" in Boston, as an old lady 
frightens chickens from her flower-beds, and the mas- 
ters and the slaves fled in terror ! 

It is pleasant to know that some of these errors have 
been corrected. 

In E. Taylor's History of the United States, the 
brief but admirably written history of Kansas by 
Noble L. Preutis had two errors, which did great in- 
justice to the memory of Governor Reeder. One rep- 
resented him as calling the first legislature to elect 
members of the legislature and "county officers." 
There were no counties made, and he could not have 
ordered county officers elected ; and one of the truth- 
ful accusations against the legislature was that it de- 
nied to the people the right to elect county officers, 
and elected them by the legislature, except the filling 
of vacancies by the governor ( pro-slavery, of course ) 
in their absence,* and no officers were elected by the 
people till the free-state men got power, in 1857. 

The other error was a statement that "Governor 
Reeder signalized the beginning of his administration 
by an abortive attempt to remove the territorial leg- 
islature to Pawnee, near Fort Riley." He had no 
power to remove a legislature, and never attempted any 
such act. He called the first legislature to meet at 
that place, as was his duty by law. To have at- 
tempted to remove a legislature would have been an 
usurpation unparalleled in American government. I 
made an appeal to the publishers of that work, backed 
up by Col. C. K. Holliday, and the correction was 

* See Kansas Historical Collections, Vol. 3, 1884, pp. 283, 28-i, 
285, etc., and " Bogus " Laws. 



22 

made in both instances, with the approval of the 
author, 

I have no doubt Professor Hodder will also make 
the proper corrections when he investigates the sub- 
ject; but his books have gone out, and imperative 
duty demands that the children of the state and all 
posterity should have these corrections as extensively 
as possible ; and the more so because this history of 
Kansas has been made a part of a school history of 
the United States, and thus goes to the world with all 
the authority of a ''professor of American history in 
the University of Kansas." 

In my long newspaper experience I have handled 
much poetry on the dead, and one verse of one of these 
effusions, though 50 years old, has never left my 
memory : 

"And can it be 

That God should take the best we see, 

And leave behind a worthless lot 

That we could spare as well as not ? " 

We cannot call up the dead and exhibit them here 
as samples of bravery, honesty, and virtue. We who 
are left can, as relics of the past, while we live, testify 
to their general good character, their .great accom- 
plishments, and point to their works — to the liberal 
and enlightened constitution which they left to us 
for our guidance ; to the two preceding constitutions 
thwarted by tyranny; to the liberal and just laws, 
from year to year made more perfect under an instru- 
ment which has existed longer than the constitutions 
of many of the other states of the Union. We cannot 
call up the martyrs who died for freedom ; but we 
can bring up our children even to this hall, where 



23 

they have placed the names of some of them in tab- 
lets of gold as mementoes of their patriotism, as the 
descendants of the Gracchi were for many generations 
wont to bring their children up to their temples to 
look upon their images in emulation of their virtues. 

As the good die young, we can, however, still point 
to a goodly number of the " worthless lot left behind," 
whereby those who follow them can conjure up some 
imagination of what the men who*'builded better 
than they knew" have done for those who come 
after them. We can now only at random point to a 
few around us as samples of the " worthless lot left 
behind," for whose characters we have no apology : 
Cyrus K. Holliday, John Armstrong, Copeland Gor- 
don, Guilford Dudley, F. W. Giles, W. C. Garvey, 
of Topeka ; B. W. Woodward, Jas. G. Sands, Wesley 
H. Duncan, Chas. S. Duncan, John G. Haskell, Peter 
D. Ridenour, H. W. Baker, Jas. C. Horton, L. J. 
Worden, Jeff. Wakefield, Ed. P. Harris, J. H. Shim- 
mons, 0. E. Learnard, S. W. Eldridge, Paul R. 
Brooks, R. G. Elliott, and C. W. Smith, of Lawrence ; 
D. R. Anthony, H. Miles Moore, Chas. Currier, E.N. 
0. Clougli, Henry and Doc. Keller, of Leavenworth. 

We have several more of the "worthless lot left 
behind," but we do not want to throw them to the 
front in a skirmish. These men remain, among the 
honored citizens of the three leading towns in which 
the great anti-slavery struggle in Kansas was fiercest. 
And I might mention that the veteran Secretary 
of this State Historical Society was one among those 
who bore a full part in that struggle in more than 
one of the towns mentioned. We can show tliem 



24 

the institutions these men inaugurated — the State 
University, the State Agricultural College, Baker 
University, and our great common-school system, 
our state-house and its occupants, most of whom 
are patterns of our pioneers ; and we can go through 
the materials of the pioneer history- of Kansas in 
the vast collections of our State Historical Society, the 
most complete and valuable possessed by any state, 
with possibly one exception. 

Let us beg to apologize to our distinguished fellow 
citizens of the enlightened East, who have lived for 
three centuries under the restraints of law, the benefits 
of churches and schools, by humbly reminding them 
that, for nearly half the period of our territorial exist- 
ence, we had no law. "We were a law unto our- 
selves." In no other condition does man so exhibit 
all the bad elements of humanity. Yet here, left to 
ourselves, as the citizens of Kansas, unmolested by 
invasion, in no place was property safer than here. 
We paid our debts honestly, to the best of our ability. 
When misfortune rendered us unable to pay, the cred- 
itor forgave the debtor. The honor of the man was 
the only guaranty. 

The golden rule was the guiding star of our exist- 
ence. Some of us may not have been able to recite it, 
but all tried to follow it. 

" Through all the warring seas of life 

One vast current sunward rolls, 
And, within all outward strife, 

One eternal right controls — 
Right, at whose divine command 

Slaves go free and captives fall, 
In the might of those who stand 

All for one and one for all." 



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